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OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD announced today... are better specs available?
- Thread starter spaceballl
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Separate drives to protect data. Raw images . If I lose a drive with one drive with my image data than i am screwed. This gives me backup for one and it also keeps raw files away from the OS. Plus I can have images from a photo shoot on both drives until it gets stored on a drobo when i get back to the studio. BTW I'm a working Pro shooter risk is not in the cards. I have seen data vanish many times due to failures , corruption, and stupid assistants doing stupid things. 
Also I can process from one drive to another faster reads and writes. Plus second drive can be used as scratch for photoshop.
Also I can process from one drive to another faster reads and writes. Plus second drive can be used as scratch for photoshop.
One topic is saying Intel, this topic says otherwise. OWC's videos are the reason I want to upgrade to an SSD, so I do trust them. That said, Intel seems to have a proven track record.
So... where do I fall?
So... where do I fall?
Separate drives to protect data. Raw images . If I lose a drive with one drive with my image data than i am screwed. This gives me backup for one and it also keeps raw files away from the OS. Plus I can have images from a photo shoot on both drives until it gets stored on a drobo when i get back to the studio. BTW I'm a working Pro shooter risk is not in the cards. I have seen data vanish many times due to failures , corruption, and stupid assistants doing stupid things.
Also I can process from one drive to another faster reads and writes. Plus second drive can be used as scratch for photoshop.
Yeah that makes sense. I don't have mission critical stuff on my computer (really just a consumer level user) and didn't think of the redundancy benefits of dual ssds.
I mean i shouldnt have to tell you that i have never seen a consumer electronics or computer equipment consensus on any product so your always going to have people who are proponents of each competing product.
The bottom line is that SSDs have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on the type of user you are. If you are a causal computer user who is not constantly creating, moving, copying large files then i think the write degradation is less of an issue for you. Like any new product, gen 1 versions usually take time to work through the bugs so going with a sandforce is gen1. Intels are more like gen 2.5 and so they have worked through more issues and thus overall are more stable (we all remember the intel firmware issue that corrupted data!).
This is how i would choose. The Sandforces look like they are the best performing drives in the class but for that you will have to suffer through gen1 issues. If you have a tolerance for this, id go that route. If you cant deal with the headaches of gen1, then go with stability and get an Intel.
All right, thank you. That finally settles it. I will go with Intel to start off with while closely eyeing OWC.
Consumer I would go for reliable. Power users like me than take the risk for the speed sake but have backups everywhere which i do . I have 2 for the OS itself than 3 or 4 options for real data. Anything happens I am covered. One little trick when traveling is partition a small external drive into 2 . One for OS and one for data so if anything happens either way you can recover.
I am having a lot of sleep issues with the OWC and am considering junking it away. My Entourage DB got corrupted on me yesterday when I cannot resume successful from sleep and I have to power off/on my machine.
Does Intel have this problem? I am considering getting an Intel drive to test it out.
Does Intel have this problem? I am considering getting an Intel drive to test it out.
Known problem. You need to use Hibernate only. And with an SSD, its not that bad as it takes about 30-45 seconds.
Get smartsleep and set to hibernate.
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my OWC sleeps 100% perfect, not sure why you guys are having these problems. I did have an issue with having a freeze up, then on reboot the drive was dead (4 days old)...OWC replaced it within two days and I restored from my time capsule backup and it has been fine since. I love my SSD, but to be honest I love my time capsule more because it gives me the confidence to not worry about the SSD...if it dies I can easily restore to a new drive
my OWC sleeps 100% perfect, not sure why you guys are having these problems. I did have an issue with having a freeze up, then on reboot the drive was dead (4 days old)...OWC replaced it within two days and I restored from my time capsule backup and it has been fine since. I love my SSD, but to be honest I love my time capsule more because it gives me the confidence to not worry about the SSD...if it dies I can easily restore to a new drive
Intel does not have this problem.
Writing the entire contents of the ram to the SSD every time you sleep it is kind of obnoxious. They really need to fix it.
It's not just obnoxious, it can down right be horrible for the life span of an SSD. For example, I have 6 GB of RAM, if my computer goes to sleep ~3 times a day, which is not unreasonable to expect, then I write an additional 18 GB (!?) to my disk each day. That cannot be good for an MLC drive...
If the drive lasts 10,000 writes and you are rewriting the whole disk once a day, it will last 27 years. Even if the disk is full and wear leveling fails (if the drive is full), the 6gb block you are writing to will last 9 years at 3 writes/day. SSD technology is still new, and I think after even a few years you will probably want to upgrade since newer SSDs will be much bigger, faster, and cost less than they do now.
Yeah that'd be true with my intel drive, which is why i have hibernate mode set to 0 on my computer (doesn't write anything to the SSD upon sleeping and also has the benefit of sleeping instantly). But the OWC drive seems to be much more resistant to that kind of thing. It would just annoy me to have to wait 45 seconds to sleep my Mac because the SSD can't sleep reliably in normal sleep modes. Reminds me a lot of my OCZ vertex days, which I'm glad are LONG gone.
I really have no idea why you guys keep saying there are sleep issues with this drive, I have no sleep issues whatsoever
So because you have no issues the poster above AND the reviewer at macperformanceguide.com must be lying?
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The sleep issue was only on the very first shipment of drives according to OWC. THe guy who on customer support told me of the issue (which I never had) and said people with those drives should have gotten e-mails about doing something with the firmware to solve the problem
The sleep issue was only on the very first shipment of drives according to OWC. THe guy who on customer support told me of the issue (which I never had) and said people with those drives should have gotten e-mails about doing something with the firmware to solve the problem
Had nothing to do with the drives I believe but with the controller firmware. And as far as i know, Sandforce has only 1 firmware release. The OCZ LE is basically the same drive and they have the same issues. On that forum people are talking about Sandforce "working on" a firmware fix.
If a new firmware has been released then i'd love to hear about it.
I think you're a bit naive if you actually believe that. Of course it has to do with the controller firmware, which has yet to be updated.
It's nice to see Crucial taking an active role with the firmware issue that came up: http://i4memory.com/wp/article/895
That's great news. They seem to be a lot more open and eager to communicate with their user base than intel with respect to firmware updates (which is really my only complaint about them.) Good stuff Crucial!
From what I read on the OWC blog the drives that had this issue were a few preproduction units that were released to reviewers prior to the actual release of the drive. These drives were running prerelease firmware and it was the prerelease firmware that was the source of the problem. All drives which were sold to the public had release firmware where the sleep issue had been corrected. So while the Sandforce is still on the first release of production firmware that firmware is a newer revision then the prerelease firmware.